Econometric Matching Models : Education, Inequality and Consumption.

Summary Over the last few decades, industrialized countries have undergone significant socio-demographic changes. Women are furthering their education, have greater access to the labor market, and men are gradually losing their share of financial power in the household. The development of contraception has allowed women to delay their age of marriage and to focus on their careers. We see a decline in fertility, a decrease in marriages and an increase in divorces. In Chapter 1 of our thesis, we are interested in the impact of these changes on individual well-being and on inequalities, more precisely on educational homogamy in France and its evolution. To do so, we consider an economic approach to marriage based on the idea that marriage generates a surplus for the spouses. We consider an econometric matching model with transferable utility developed by Choo and Siow (2006) in order to estimate on French data, the marriage surplus and the educational homogamy over the period 1962-2011.The focus on inequality issues will become much deeper in the second chapter. The increase in homogamy leads to an increase in inequality. It is interesting to measure the impact of marriage on inequality, specifically income inequality. We therefore need a continuous matching model framework with transferable utility. For this, we rely on the model of Dupuy and Galichon (2014) which is a continuous extension of the model of Choo and Siow. We propose a slightly different approach to it in taking the possibility of singlehood in market equilibrium. Finally, we estimate this model on PSID data over the period 1968-2001.Chapter three takes the model proposed in the second and aims to solve analytically the matching market equilibrium with transferable utility. We place ourselves in a specific framework of a quasi full market where all individuals are almost married. We first show the equivalence with the Dupuy and Galichon model and then provide an analytical solution of the problem by considering a quadratic specification of the joint surplus from the matching and a Gaussian distribution of the observable variables. This chapter follows the objectives of Bolijov and Galichon (2015) work but with a different approach. In particular, we propose the analytical solutions of individual surpluses from marriage.The last chapter builds on the model developed in Chapter 2, and tries to recover the consumption within households at market equilibrium. We consider a matching market with transferable utility guaranteed by quasi-linear consumption preferences (Bergstrom and Cornes, 1983). Individuals choose to marry and then decide to consume public and private goods within the household. We show that it is possible to recover the parameters of the preferences in the marriage equilibrium. We estimate the model on PSID data over the period 1968-2001.